Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Here’s what the Supreme Court actually said about ‘birthright’ citizenship

Leftists concocted an ingenious game of judicial supremacism that creates a one-way ratchet for their policy outcomes – heads they win, tails they win. Yet the “conservative” legal community chooses to play this game. Nowhere is this more evident than in the debate over so-called birthright citizenship, where the Left cherry-picks one non-binding footnote of a terrible decision misinterpreting another bad decision that violates previous precedent, the plain meaning and purpose of the 14th Amendment, sovereignty, and the social compact while collectively ignoring endless uninterrupted case law indicating the opposite – all for the political outcome of giving our sacred birthright to illegal aliens.

The case liberals and pseudo-conservatives point to for the concept of rewarding invaders with citizenship is the Wong Kim Ark decision in 1898. But it’s important to note that even the notion of adopting automatic birthright citizenship for legal immigrants as a constitutional imperative (I support it as a matter of policy) was clearly an activist decision overturning precedent.

The truth about the 14th Amendment and citizenship

Rep. James F. Wilson, R-Iowa, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee back in the 1860s who helped draft the 14th Amendment, spoke emphatically that it was “establishing no new right, declaring no new principle.” “It is not the object of this bill to establish new rights, but to protect and enforce those which belong to every citizen,” declared Wilson in 1866.

The notion that an amendment designed to grant freed slaves who lived here for centuries and had no allegiance to any other jurisdiction the basic rights of American citizens would be used as a tool to prevent Congress from regulating citizenship for immigrants of all stripes is scandalous.

The first sentence of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” We need not speculate what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means. As Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said during the debate over the 14th Amendment, “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States means subject to its “complete” jurisdiction, “not owing allegiance to anybody else.” Of course persons present inside American territory are subject to our partial jurisdiction in the sense that they have to obey our laws and are subject to criminal prosecution for disobeying our laws. But when congressional drafters added the second phrase of jurisdiction to the citizenship clause, they were clearly limiting citizenship to those who, in the words of one of the key drafters, were subject to “complete” jurisdiction as Americans.